Politics and war, science and sports, memoir and biography — there's a great big world of nonfiction books out there just waiting to be read. We picked the 100 best and most influential written in English since 1923, the beginning of TIME ... magazine

The Origins of Totalitarianism

After Nazism, Stalinism and the horrors of World War II, it was right to ask, How did we get here? How could we have let someone like Adolf Hitler come to power? How did anti-Semitism become so widespread? Hannah Arendt, one of the 20th century’s foremost political theorists, found the seeds of anti-Semitism, imperialism and totalitarianism in late 19th century Europe, when the nation-state was on the decline. She traces the two most important political movements of the 20th century — Nazism and Stalinism — along the enormously complex path that culminated in the rise of Germany’s Hitler and the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin, men of the same political coin. They were able to transform classes into masses and were bent on world domination by means of fear and propaganda. Arendt’s masterwork was the first to try to make the incomprehensible comprehensible.